The NAV | 365 People inspire Girls into Tech with latest workshop

In February 2020 we visited the Clere School in Burghclere, a school local to The NAV | 365 People (TNP), where we held 3 classes of 15 girls. Normally we work with year 8 girls, but this time we wanted to stretch our reach and do sessions with years 8, 9 and 10.

The tasks are centred around an example of the student developing new attributes to an item table for a fashion brand to help them understand what stock of different items they have. The students create a dress as an item and add attributes within the development environment such as brand, size, colour, etc. with different field types such as text, option strings or Booleans.

Once they get the hang of it, they start getting more creative with the different items and attributes they want to develop. Some of the great examples we had were the students adding items such as beanies and stockings with interesting attributes such as ‘eco-friendly’, ‘occasion’ and whether the outfit is ‘sling accessible’ (one of the students had a broken arm!).

 

I think it opened the girls’ eyes to the fact that there are so many different job opportunities within ‘tech’ and they needn’t all be around coding and techie things. At that age, you wouldn’t consider that a tech company needs people who are engaging with customers on a non-tech basis. Using examples for tasks and customers that were relatable also seemed have an impact – even companies that make and distribute hairbrushes, make up and fashion have tech-needs!"

 

After all the fun developing, the focus moved to the different roles within technology and the different skill sets – the idea is to expand the girls’ thinking about what a ‘Girl in Tech’ is – it’s not just about coding (even though that’s an important part), but also includes roles such as Consultant, Solution Architect, Account Management, Marketing or Sales. We end the day with a little more on what TNP do and how important it is to get more girls into technology!